The cost of complexity

Fukushima nuclear plant, Japan, March 15, 2011

 
Thomas Homer-Dixon is a professor of international affairs at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario province, Canada. His writing and research cover the complex, systems-level interaction of science, technology, environment, and economics. A major theme in his work is that the complexity of human social-technical systems has vastly exceeded the evolved cognitive capacity of the human brain -- and even our ability to pool collective brainpower artificially to solve our problems, by means of our cultures and institutions.

Our high tech civilization, in short, has become more complicted by far than we can manage. Homer-Dixon's writing vividly conveys how this affects the multiple, massive, converging crises of the twenty first century. He analyzes how human institutions must face, simultaneously, an array of problems that would be overwhelming even in isolation. We have to deal with them all at once, using brains -- and organized collections of brainpower -- that simply aren't up to the task. Too many problems create information overload, from climate change, biodiversity loss, topsoil loss, ocean acidification, financial gyrations, mass poverty and unemployment, technological flux, energy shortages, raw materials exhaustion, unraveling food supplies, disappearing fresh water, political extremism and genocide. It's too much.

Homer-Dixon argues that it isn't just that we feel overwhelmed. We are, in fact, overwhelmed. We are biologically and cognitively unable to function in the social settings that our own evolution made possible. Which is why our world is unraveling. Too many problems accumulating too quickly, far faster than we can process, defying our ability to organize resources for any responses.

We've seen this process unfold with particular vividness in the first three months of 2011. A vast swirl of interconnected crises: revolutions, insurgencies, oil shortages, food scarcity, drought and heatwave and storms and climate change, market and fiscal oscillations. And now, on top of all that, an out-of-nowhere blindside earthquake and tsunami, pile-driving one of the world's most advanced economies into a flooded, blood-soaked heap of smoking rubble. The devastation of Japan has further rammed an uncertain, reeling global system.

Worse things may lie ahead. The latest reports say that three potential nuclear melt-downs are in progress at damaged Japanese nuclear plants. Global food and energy prices look set to continue rising this year. North Africa and the Middle East continue to roil with violence and political upheaval.

Our civilization is out of control.


For thinking about how this systems-level cascade of crisis works, I've found Thomas Homer-Dixon's writing enormously useful. His clarity and concreteness get beyond the usual airy academic abstractions, helping readers visualize the implications of runaway social complexity.

My favorite example comes from Homer-Dixon's 2001 book The Ingenuity Gap. As a metaphor for the human predicament, Homer-Dixon offers the crash of United Airlines Flight 232 on July 19, 1989. Bound from Denver to Chicago, a tiny crack in the fan of the plane's tail engine suddenly ripped open, blowing the entire engine to shreds. The explosion of the engine ripped apart nearby tubing of the plane's hydraulic system -- cutting off the entire hydraulic flow to the plane's maneuvering system. All of it. All the rudders, elevators, and ailerons used to control the plane became nonfunctional simultaneously.

The designers of the plane, a DC-10, had judged such a catastrophic failure impossible. But it happened to United Flight 232 on that day. The suddenly uncontrollable plane, minus one of three engines, banked steeply downward and to the right. The crew declared an emergency and began trying to regain control. The flight controls wouldn't respond -- none of the water-pressure-dependent flaps and stabilizers worked. The pilot managed to pull out of the descent by alternating power levels in the two remaining engines under the wing, but the resulting swings in thrust made the plane bob up and down while moving slowly in huge, miles-around circles to the right.

The complexity of the situation was enormous. Manipulating the dual engine thrust to wallow in circles through the sky took all of the captain's concentration, because any error might mean loss of what little control he had. Meanwhile, captain and co-pilot had to communicate with ground facilities and emergency crews, consult with experts by radio on possible ways to restore maneuvering power, manage preparation of flight attendants and passengers for an emergency landing, continuously assess instrument readings and search with their own eyes and ears for signs of potential additional damage to the aircraft, all while trying to determine the best of multiple potential landing sites and veer towards one of them in a barely controlled descent.

A few minutes into the crisis, one of the passengers -- a fellow airline pilot -- offered his assistance. The captain and co-pilot accepted instantly, briefed him, and gave him responsibility for handling the impossibly delicate yet oil-tanker-unwieldy task of steering the plane entirely by varying thrust to two separate engines. Having a third pilot focus on that single overwhelming task gave the other two men in the cockpit a barely conceivable chance of dealing with the rest of what was unfolding.

Homer-Dixon describes the crew's predicament as follows. It's worth quoting at some length. 

As the crew members tried to make sense of their instruments and the data they received via their eyes and ears, problems cascaded into other problems with almost overwhelming speed. The crew was swept along by a tightly coupled chain of cause and effect. For forty four harrowing minutes the captain and his officers assessed a prodigious flow of incoming information, made countless inquiries and observations, and issued dozens of commands. Even with extra help from the check pilot [the passenger who came forward to offer aid], it was all they could do to keep the plane aloft and roughly on course to a crash landing...

The situation they faced was unprecedented: they hadn't trained for it; no airline crew had ever trained for it. Such a disaster was thought too unlikely or too catastrophic to justify specific training. The pilot and his officers therefore had to invent, on the spot, a method for controlling the plane. They also had to assess the plane's damage, choose a place to land, and prepare their passengers for a crash landing.

The moment the engine exploded, crew members had to meet a sharply higher requirement for ingenuity -- that is, for practical solutions to the problem of flying the aircraft in new conditions. 

For the book, Homer-Dixon consulted a post-accident study of the decision-making processes used by the crew. The author of the study, Steven Predmore of Delta Airlines, wrote his dissertation on the Flight 232 event. He used quantitative techniques to analyze the amount of information being processed by crew members during each minute of the crisis, then communicated among themselves and ground authorities in multiple, simultaneous, overlapping conversations.

Here's how Homer-Dixon summarizes the analysis by Predmore of Delta Airlines.

For the entire duration of the crisis, the crew members were close to a human being's peak cognitive load: they were processing information, making decisions, and supplying ingenuity about as quickly as humanly possible. The load was extreme in part because the crew was enveloped by uncertainty and lacked a clear understanding of the aircraft's state... Ingenuity requirements were so high that the check airman [third pilot] quickly became indispensable. "The demands created by the use of differential engine thrust to control the aircraft" [said Predmore] made it almost impossible for either the captain or the first officer to attend to other tasks. The addition of the check airman to the crew allowed the captain to assign priority to tasks, divide and delegate them among crew members, and monitor the crew's performance. "The captain was an amazing leader," Predmore noted. The check airman's help, combined with the captain's effective organizing of the resources he had, allowed the crew to act like a precisely coordinated team; they became almost a single mind.

At about 4:00 p.m., July 19, 1989, United Flight 232 approached the airport at Sioux City, Iowa for an emergency landing. Homer-Dixon cites the transcript of cockpit conversations in describing the culmination of the crisis.

Captain:  "Left turns! Left turns! Close the throttles! 

First Officer: "Close 'em off." 

Captain: "Right turn. Close the throttles." 

First Officer: "Pull 'em off!"

Check Airman: "Nah. I can't pull 'em off or we'll lose it. That's what's turning ya!" 

Unidentified voice: "Okay." 

First Officer: "Left throttle -- left! Left! Left! Left! Left! Left! Left! -- Left! Left! Left!

[Ground proximity alarm sounds]

First Officer: "We're turning! We're turning! We're turning!"

Unidentified voice: "God!"

[Impact]

The plane hit the ground at the runway's leading edge, just to the left of the centerline. The right landing gear touched the ground first, then the right wing. As the plane skidded across the runway to the right it lost its right engine, chunks of its right wing, and its tail engine. It plowed across the grass, lost its left engine and tail section, and hit the pavement of another runway. The cockpit nose broke off. The remainder of the fuselage cartwheeled away and exploded in flames, coming to rest upside down in the middle of a field.

Of the 296 people on board, 111 died, including one flight attendant. The entire cockpit crew survived. 

In post-accident analysis, investigators concluded that saving any of the passengers at all constituted a miracle. The crew somehow managed to keep just enough tenuous control of the aircraft to make a barely controlled landing, thus saving two thirds of the lives in their hands. Later, investigators programmed the situation into a flight simulator. Every simulation ended with a completely uncontrolled crash and total destruction of the aircraft.

 United Airlines Flight 232, Sioux City, Iowa, July 19, 1989

* * * *  *

Nuclear engineers in Japan today, at this very second, face a situation much like the one confronting United Flight 232. Multiple reactors crippled by an emergency deemed not worth preparing for. No way to manage the enormous and constantly escalating complexity of the resulting crisis. No way to supply enough ingenuity quickly enough to avoid some kind of catastrophe.

Much the same is true for the policy-makers currently in control of human societies. They operate a super-complex technological infrastructure encircling this planet, relentlessly destroying the climate, ecosystems, and resources that sustain the infrastructure itself. The only possible solution is to immediately begin rapid, gargantuan reductions in the resource consumption and infrastructure use of our entire species. Psychological and social realities make any such solution impossible. We don't have enough ingenuity to make a difference.

Meaning that we are in the process of crash landing. The only hope is that something will survive in the aftermath.

Ruminations on the life work of Hari Seldon

I've been fascinated my whole life by attempts to predict the future of human societies. It started as a childhood love for science fiction, which led me to Isaac Asimov's Foundation series. In those books, a mathematical genius named Hari Seldon (for whom this blog is named) develops the science of "psychohistory" -- computer algorithms capable of accurately predicting the future course of a galaxy-spanning society inhabited by trillions of sentient beings.

My fascination with societal forecasting continued in graduate school, with long pondering of dense academic tomes on quantitative forecasting techniques in economics and political science. Plus the qualitative, humanities-based literary-esque methods of scholar policy wonks like George Frost Kennan. The quantitative models were almost entirely useless for anything beyond trivial purposes. I remember sitting at a conference in which a quantitative modeler enthused about his computer simulations predicting that unregulated markets would distribute resources unequally. Gosh, really? In contrast, the famously non-quantitative George Kennan accurately predicted, more or less, the collapse of the Soviet Union four decades before the fact.


My interest in such things continued after voluntary departure from academia, into my current existence as a low-paid clerical drone thrall in post-Cold War dystopian late capitalist America.  The major influence over my thinking since then has been the science fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson. Robinson, who holds a PhD in English, combines deep understanding of the humanities, including history, with in-depth research into quantitative sciences and cutting edge technology. I once interviewed him for two hours at a coffee shop in Davis, California, and later got to hang out with him at a very cool party populated by famous science fiction authors. One day I might summon the courage to write it all up. But never mind that for now.

Robinson's dual use of "the two cultures" -- science and the humanities -- is rare among literary types and humanities professors, who are generally too stupid or lazy to bother acquiring much expertise in anything other than the dessicated, math-free prose of their own tiny sub-field. Which annually produces completely meaningless and soon forgotten pieces of writing that are read by a grand worldwide total of perhaps 50 people.

On the other hand, science and engineering types typically lack the subtle thinking and adequate qualitative knowledge of history and political-economy necessary to think about human societies in sophisticated terms. So instead they think about politics and society as akin to equations in thermodynamics -- so simple and clear that the resulting descriptions and prescriptions bear no relationship to observable reality. Consider the vast outpouring of simple-minded Ayn Rand libertarianism churned out by so many science fiction authors with PhDs in the natural sciences or engineering. It's all embarrassingly facile tripe, to say nothing of morally abhorrent (let's create private markets to sell rivers and babies and harvested organs, yay!).

I lack a degree in a quantitative discipline to go with my master's in history, but I've at least made an effort to learn some of the language of the quantitative fields. Done some coursework in algebra, calculus, chemistry, biology, and computer science, plus lots of spare reading of scientific work directed at reasonably not-stupid lay people. It can be done.

And it all comes in handy, both sides of the quantitative/qualitative coin, when trying to think about human societies as systems. They are real, physical entities, made up of multiple, interacting parts, which in turn seem to be governed by regularities or patterns. "Laws" or "rules" would be too strong a term. Human societies display recurring trends, recognizable sequences of change. But none of it can really be quantified. No matter what the economists or computer scientists say. The computer program Sim City is an amazing creation, based on 100% quantitative algorithms processed on a microchip. But Sim City doesn't do prediction. The algorithms are useful for producing behavior on a computer screen that is strongly reminiscent of phenomena seen in real life: the organic growth and development over time of a concentrated urban settlement full of human animals. But the algorithms that produce the simulated behavior don't correspond in a precise, one-to-one fashion, to rules exactly governing rigorously discrete objects in physical reality.

That precise, one-to-one correspondence does prevail, to an extraordinary degree, in the most fundamental physical sciences. Sub-atomic particles, molecular chemistry, and bodies in motion really do obey exact rules that our mathematical equations can describe exactly. Or at least to such a high degree of precision that any lack of exactness is usually trivial for everyday purposes. In Sim City, the equations in the computer program are useful approximations. They are to a real city what a paint stroke is to the Mona Lisa's face. In physics, the equations are the face. For all practical purposes, anyway.

The mysteriously exact correspondence between equations from the human brain and the rules of nature is one of the greatest puzzles ever encountered by our species. The mysterious correspondence is the reason the natural sciences work so well. For some, it also strongly suggests the existence of an intelligence responsible for the creation and functioning of all that exists.

In any case, the correspondence is the only thing that allows us to make pronouncements, with some authority, on how physical phenomena will unfold in the future. In simpler language, our ability to uncover the rules of reality allows us to make predictions about that reality. In the natural sciences, this effort has been extraordinarily successful. This is true even in exploring systems that don't allow precise prediction of a future course of events -- nonlinear systems like fluids and ecosystems, or the fundamentally chance-based actions of quantum particles. In these cases, we can still precisely quantify and anticipate the boundaries of possibility or the nature of uncertainty.

In the social sciences, essentially none of this is possible. We've never found a better method of anticipating the future of human societies than the literary approach of George Kennan and Kim Stanley Robinson. They think about what a society is, what are its parts, what are some of the rules of thumb for its possible behaviors, and then they speculate on which way the whole mess might go, for some defined period of time. Months, decades, centuries. Kennan wrote about the future decades of the obscene Marxist-Leninist monstrosity administered from the Kremlin. Robinson writes of possible post-capitalist societies in the coming centuries or in histories that never were.

Both of these men, in essence, are running simulations on the world's most sophisticated computer -- the human brain. It's the only real method we have of doing societal prediction. And the only one we are likely to have, for as long as our species exists. As I've written elsewhere, human societies can't be quantified in the way that physical systems can. That's because, ultimately, human behavior rests in the mysterious phenomenon known as "consciousness." The ultimate something in our minds that makes us aware of ourselves and our existence, giving us the ability to envision, assess, and choose different courses of action.

We know, beyond any reasonable doubt -- I emphasize any -- that this capacity rests in the physical substance of our brain. Not, as most spiritual belief systems would have it, in something non-physical. Chop out a part of the brain, human being turns to vegetable. Or imagines his wife is a hat. Therefore, consciousness equals brain. End of story. Consciousness comes from our brain, period. At the same time, though, we have no idea how billions of interacting neurons, ganglia, axons, neurotransmitters and such add up, collectively, to "I." There's too much working too fast at too tiny a level for quantification. We can't attach numbers to how the mind works at its most basic level. And, odds are, we never will. In this case, something physical can also be inherently non-quantifiable.

To put it more poetically, there is such a thing as the human soul. Not a supernatural entity that constitutes the real me and continues after I'm dead. When I'm dead, my soul is annihilated along with my brain. It is physical, therefore mortal. But the soul remains a mystery eternal, beyond final understanding, even so.

This limits our ability to predict our future, but still enables us to try. In hopes of finding wisdom, somehow, to make this life better than it is now. It's not much, but it's all we have.

The great burning: paleoclimate data puts it all in perspective

I've learned by now to be cautious about the larger policy implications of any single peer-reviewed paper in the scientific literature. There are too many ways for us non-scientists to trip over our relative ignorance of statistical methodology and data processing.

Still, sometimes I can't help myself. The journal Science recently published a review article analyzing the existing body of literature on paleoclimate -- i.e., data about how the Earth's climate behaved in the past. So in this case, I'm not really reacting to just one paper, but rather to a summary of many others. And some rather hideous findings. You can read a summary for policy wonks here. On our current course, the literature suggests, greenhouse gas concentrations one hundred years from now will rival the highest levels ever seen in the history of this planet. At those levels, the Earth's mean annual surface temperature in the past reached about 87 degrees Fahrenheit. That's up from 59 degrees Fahrenheit today.

As often as I read this kind of stuff, I still can't get over how incomprehensibly awful it is. Or how little clue the policy wonk community has about what's really happening. An 87 degree global mean surface temperature will burn human civilization to ashes. It will, according to the article referenced above, make the middle latitudes of the planet literally uninhabitable -- the combination of heat and humidity will cause respiration in the human body to cease. Whatever is left of humanity will be forced to tiny enclaves in Siberia, northern Canada, and Antarctica. With a vast zone of death separating them for thousands of years, until the temperature someday subsides.

But tonight's State of the Union address will talk about taxes, entitlements, and Afghanistan.

History cinema geekery: JFK makes the other guy blink

Yesterday was the twentieth anniversary of the inauguration of John F. Kennedy. The day of his "ask not what your country can do for you" speech. Which explains the mysterious ghost of JFK appearing on the Google home page yesterday. Surrounded by idealistic words and whatnot.

I've been in a movie kind of mood all week, wandering through clips on YouTube, thinking about films I've seen and have yet to see. Pondering how the pop culture ether has shaped my thinking about pretty much everything for my whole life. As important as science and empiricism and academic inquiry are, there's something to be said for stories and art in the way we humans understand our place in the universe.

JFK has always been a great source of stories, both real and fictionalized. Most polls of Americans rate him among our greatest presidents. Because most people remember only the facile image of the vigorous young leader, appearing to be bold and decisive as he delivered his inspiring rhetoric for the cameras. Then pitching forward in an open limousine in Dallas, before a bullet blew his skull and brain to bits. Camelot lost, the king cut down in his prime.

But in fact Kennedy was very much a mixed bag as chief executives go. His personal life was a disaster that almost certainly compromised his ability to serve as president. Fucking the mistresses of mafia dons will do that. So will letting a quack doctor pump you full of amphetamines to heighten thrill-seeking, risk-addictive behavior. Then there are the highly questionable policies. A vast, across the board military buildup that was totally unnecessary. A fixation on the clownish commie dictator in Havana. Reinforcing the stupid and murderous American military expedition in Vietnam.

On the other hand, there are the moments in which this cynical, profane, reckless man showed hints of genuine humanity and greatness -- or seemed to do so. Such glimpses depend greatly upon the eye of the beholder. It's far too easy to take a fleeting moment and inflate it into myth. Myths aren't necessarily bad. They are stories, upon which we story-telling human animals rely to construct the meaning of our existence.

Kennedy's occasional flashes of seeming brilliance enable myth-building and story telling. How "real" the myths and stories are is open to question.

One story goes like this. He set the United States on course to land human beings on another planetary body. Which they did. This alone ranks as possibly the single most astounding achievement in the 200,000 year history of our species. The only greater success would be that of the first humans to explore beyond Africa long ago, a venture that led our race to colonize the far corners of the Earth.


JFK on the need for space exploration, September 12, 1962

Other stories are told. After initial indifference, Kennedy moved slowly but surely toward putting the national government on the side of civil rights for African Americans. He changed the lives of people around the world by creating the peace corps. Some of the medical students I work with served in that organization, gaining insight and wisdom they might not otherwise have found.

And Kennedy decided against going to war with the Soviet Union over Cuba in October 1962. His performance in that crisis may not have been the cool, masterfully orchestrated manipulation of events described by his great hagiographers, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and Theodore Sorensen. But it was good enough. His choices allowed me and a lot of other people to be born in the years that followed. Kennedy created the current historical time line of the universe we know, in which the United States did not, as planned, launch massive air strikes against Soviet forces in Cuba on the morning of Monday, October 29, 1962. Throughout the crisis, many of his advisers pushed Kennedy hard to forget about blockades and back-channel negotiations and just get on with bombing the fuck out of the Russians. He didn't.

One of my favorite movies is an idealized, not entirely accurate, still highly watchable retelling of Kennedy's actions in the Cuban Missile Crisis. The movie is Thirteen Days, released a decade ago. If you can't stand Kevin Costner, as many people evidently cannot, you will not be able to watch this movie. Costner plays Kenneth O'Donnell, a member of JFK's "Irish mafia" White House inner circle. I kind of like him, actually. Despite the typically bad Costner rendition of an exotic accent.

Bruce Greenwood as JFK does an amazing job blending elements of the president's popular image and actual personality. Cool, sardonic, cautious. The thrill-addict, horn-dog part of JFK's personality is conveniently left out. It's still a magnetic portrayal in an entertaining film. With little touches that make Greenwood's Kennedy feel real. Example: JFK leans forward to make a point and momentarily shudders from a spasm in his back. Greenwood's face and body language, in that flash of time, betray bodily torment kept constantly repressed by sheer will. The real Kennedy, thanks to war injuries and a variety of ailments, endured agonizing physical pain for every moment of his adult life.

Below is a clip from the film. It depicts the first high-seas showdown between the American and Soviet navies, on the morning of October 24, 1962. While my graduate degree in history hasn't made me rich, it does yield a geeky sort of thrill at seeing historical figures on film that most people have never heard of. Dean Rusk, Maxwell Taylor, Robert McNamara, John McCone, Adlai Stevenson, McGeorge Bundy. When I was in grad school, some of them were still alive.



In stories, a President can save the world. It's not like that today. But I like to think there's some wisdom to be found even so, in the stories of how people once made fateful choices, great and small.

"ALERT: Active shooter situation... this is not a drill."

The woman hurried through the door and fumbled it shut behind her, face tightening.

She said: there's a man with a gun in the building. The police say we have to lock the door and not let anyone in. She added: shots have been fired, one person hit, possibly killed.

Minutes later, an emergency text message from the university came through on my phone: "Active shooter situation at UNMH (University of New Mexico Hospital). All Central and North Campus personnel should lockdown until further notice.  Male suspect with small silver handgun." The university web page repeated the message, adding: "This is not a drill."

At the time, I didn't find any reassurance in the phrase "small silver handgun." Instead, my mind honed in on the words "active shooter" and "lockdown." And on the first word-of-mouth accounts: man with gun, running wild in this very building, one person shot and possibly dead.

Before too much time had passed, it became clear that the initial word-of-mouth was ludicrously wrong. The shooter was never in our building. No one had been shot at all. Only a single, random shot had been fired by a stupid, confused man who got in a shouting match with his girlfriend, then ran away.

It all ended anticlimactically with an "all clear" message. Back to the routine.

For a few minutes, though, before anybody really knew anything, I found myself locked in an underground room -- a training facility for doctors to practice on simulated patients -- with strangers who believed, as I did, that we might be in the middle of the next Columbine or Virginia Tech.

After the woman came through the door warning of an armed maniac looking for blood, I grabbed an L-shaped metal machine part of some kind from a nearby table. Trying to imagine myself smashing it into the gunman's skull. Trying.

A random thought interrupted my surreal vision: this will be all over CNN. My parents will find out about it that way. Unless I call them.

This was my second day back at work in the New Year, 2011.

* * * * *

An autumn night, a decade before. My girlfriend was so angry she was shaking. Angry at me.

No, no, no, she spat, not looking at me. It's never justified. Never.

Days earlier, we'd sat together for hours watching television coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks. By late afternoon on that day, after seeing countless replays of the planes impacting and the towers collapsing and the Pentagon burning, in an endless surreal loop of video catastrophe, we couldn't take it anymore. We went to grab a burger at an empty greasy spoon restaurant.

A couple sat down in the booth next to us. I overheard a fragment of their conversation. The woman hissed venom from her mouth: we should kill every fucking one of them, she said. No question on that day of who she meant and why.

That evening I stood with my girlfriend at a peace vigil, joining hands with others by candlelight in the haven of the local Unitarian church. The reverend acknowledged that she had no words. But still she asked of the empty quiet presence in that place: let us have peace.

Days passed. The President spoke to Congress and promised vengeance. And that right soon. Before the attacks I had nothing but contempt for the tiny little rodent man from Texas. But I watched him promise retribution and I felt my teeth coming together in satisfaction. Yes. The people who did this have to pay. We know who they are and where they are. And we're coming.

News reports spoke of United States military forces moving into position, bearing down on Afghanistan. Fleets converging on the north Indian Ocean. American troops and supplies moving by rail across the territory of the vanished Soviet empire, toward the mountains and valleys that once claimed so many Soviet dead. The U.S. Secretary of State delivered an ultimatum to the government of Pakistan: cooperate in the coming war, or we're coming for you, too. The leadership of Pakistan bowed.

I greeted the news with approval. My girlfriend did not. We shouldn't go to war, she said.

Well, then, I replied, what should we do?

I don't know. Not war.

They killed 3,000 Americans, I said. We know where they are and if we don't destroy them they'll do it again.

Her reply: eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Just because it was done to us doesn't make it right for us to do it back.

Incredulous me: are you insane?

She was shaking. So angry I thought her face would split open. She said: you have no idea what violence is.

Incredulous me: I don't care. The people who did this have to pay. Getting rid of them is also legitimate self defense. We have every right to protect ourselves.

Her: no, no, no. It's never justified. Never. You wouldn't talk like that if it had been done to you.

Me: Done to you? Like what?

Her: Like being raped.

* * * * *

You have no idea what violence is.

My girlfriend spoke a foreign language. (A) She had been raped; therefore (B) U.S. military action against Afghanistan was wrong. It took me years to understand the logic and experience connecting A and B.

When the American war in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001, I thought of foreign policy mostly as a cerebral game of strategy. You know, like Risk or chess. Sure, it had ethical and emotional components, to be hashed out in seminars and panel discussions, along with calculations of ends and means, budgets and doctrines, national interest and geopolitical stability.

As a good socialist, I was generally skeptical of U.S. military interventions and favored big reductions in the defense budget. Funding domestic social programs over expensive global military commitments was, to me, good public policy and the right thing to do. Using U.S. military forces to kill people was almost always a bad idea. Except, I always hastened to add, in truly exceptional circumstances.

Like Pearl Harbor. And Auschwitz. And September 11. In catastrophic circumstances like that, it seemed to me, every community of human beings reserves to itself the right of self-defense. Because the nature of the threat leaves no choice other than war. That means killing other human beings, systematically and deliberately, for as long as it takes. Until the threat is removed. It's a horrible thing, I thought, but sometimes unavoidable.

That's the way I thought in the years leading up to September 11. And in the immediate aftermath. Back then I occasionally wrote earnest, measured essays, contemplating the tragic necessity of deadly violence to defend national well-being. The use of military force was just one instrument in the game, and the game was about concepts more than people. The concepts were rendered in the antiseptic language of what C. Wright Mills once called the power elite. The people who run this planet. Presidents, generals, ministers, propagandists, technocrats, executives. When they speak of September 11 and the ensuing war on terror, their language invokes stability, international systems, asymmetric threats, nation-building, counter-insurgency, geopolitics, and the like.

To the woman I slept with on the night of September 11, foreign policy meant something very different. Something that made her muscles tighten and her blood turn to fire and her voice shake with rage.

You have no idea what violence is.

* * * * *

Often, when she slept, her body writhed as if being ripped apart. She whimpered and cried. When she woke up the crying wouldn't stop. Sometimes she woke in a heaving convulsion that ended with a helpless strangling wail of anguish.

By day, in a professional setting, she conducted herself with calm good humor and grace. She smiled at colleagues and when she gave an academic talk she conducted the audience like an orchestra at her command. You had to know her very well to pick up on the tightness that flashed across her face, the fleeting ghost of worry in her eyes.

At night, the professional persona crumbled to dust. She paced and fretted, her body taut, every motion rippling with the energy of accumulated tension. She talked incessantly about every detail of the day. Who said things to her in the professional arena, what was said, how it was said, the range of possible motivations behind the words, the response she gave, whether the response was effective, the range of possible hidden motivations and thoughts underlying the exchange. A never ending hyper-conscious calculus, analyzing in microscopic detail the flow of events in the previous hours. Looking for signs of something that went wrong, or might go wrong, or could conceivably go wrong. Worry seeped into her psyche like acid. Eating her away.

She lived in a constant state of near-paralyzing anxiety that she had learned, over the years, to control. Enough, at least, to get by. To pursue an extraordinarily demanding professional career. To succeed. To do more good in this world than most people will ever dream. But at night when the acid of fear and dread burned its way into her soul nothing could convince her of the success she had achieved or the good she had done or the future that lay before her. She simply ruminated in her private invisible torture chamber of anxiety, and nightmares, and tears.

In the worst hours before dawn, she saw no future at all. She talked about driving to a particular place where she would put an end to her agony for all time. She had it picked out. A nine hundred foot gorge cleaving the Earth on its descent to the Rio Grande.

Then at daybreak she woke up from it all. Her exterior chrysalis of good humor returned and she navigated the sunlight. While inside she waited for night and tears.

Sometimes the veil of agony lifted. I remember sitting with her once by the stillness of a lake in the mountains. Soon we would have to drive back to the city. I said: it will be a shame to go back to the real world. 

No, she replied, to the water and wind and silence and mountains older than time. This is the real world. Here. 

In her childhood, she was raped. Over and over and over again, for a very long time. The details aren't important. She told them to me, at great length, and I listened. It was the only way that I thought I could help. By listening. And so I did, for hours beyond count, over a period of years. To the stories of what it feels like to be a child and be raped. In the course of the telling, I gradually absorbed the emotions underlying her story, maybe because I tried so hard to feel it with her and understand. Her psyche erupted over and through and into me like a storm on the surface of the sun. Sensations in my head of what she must have seen, heard. Smelled. The stench of the men raping her. The power of muscles forcing her down. The shadows over her like demons, without mercy. Taking the soul of a child and burning it as if with hot metal, making the child scream, doing it over and over and over, no matter how much she begged them to stop. 

The child grew up with more than just memories. She carried the mutilation inside her. A spirit burned and mangled, the pain of it searing her in adulthood, even in dreams, every second of every day of her life. As surely as if someone had forced her to the ground and physically burned her face away with a blow torch while she screamed and begged them to stop.

She taught me, at least a little, of what it means to be helpless, wanting only to be loved and cared for, while your body lies at the mercy of absolute power that takes all hope of mercy away.

The child who lived through that experience became a woman and found a place for herself in the world. She was a Wiccan. She beheld living things and saw them blazing with ancient incandescent fountains of light. They were holy spirits to be worshiped and cherished. Hers had been broken when her life was new.

* * * * *

The violence my one-time lover experienced as a child broke her soul and remade it as something else.

In clinical terms, she experienced a long series of "Adverse Childhood Events." ACES, in the jargon of the mental health professions. The term, according to the research of neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, and others, refers to extreme traumas inflicted during the critical period when a young human nervous system is still in flux, still being formed. These incidents of extreme violence will fundamentally reshape that child's emotional makeup and cognitive functions from what they would otherwise have been. Forever. Compared to other parts of the population, these children grow up to experience more frequent and intense episodes of anxiety and depression. As adults, they often have difficulty forming relationships. They may be prone to risky behaviors, substance abuse, and suicide. If they don't come to understand themselves and what they went through, they face higher odds than others against leading a happy life.

These effects have been observed in survivors of childhood rape, torture, imprisonment, natural disasters, and war. Those events, almost inevitably, inflict a lifetime of psychic agony on the children who survive them. The agony, in a great many cases, will lead to physical suffering, spiritual devastation, and early death.

This is what my lover meant when she spoke about the American war in Afghanistan after September 11. This is what she was thinking when she lashed back at my theoretically-informed apology for vengeance by saying: you have no idea what violence means. To her, waging a war in Afghanistan meant condemning an unknown number of children to unspeakable violence even greater than what she experienced herself. With even greater effect.

When I spoke of geopolitics and the defense of national interests, she didn't hear the language of the foreign policy elite, in which I had been trained as a graduate student long ago. No. She heard a defense of mutilation and suffering without any conceivable justification. She heard the casual dismissal of atrocities, measured not in casualty estimates but in splatters of blood and internal organs smeared across chunks of shattered rock. Measured, too, by the shuddering night time sobs of the survivors, decades after the bombing stopped.

Remembering her words today, I can't believe she ever spoke to me again.

* * * * *

If you know how to listen, you begin to understand how much violence lives alongside you, in the fabric of  everyday life. Violence, and what it does to people. Not only children, but grown men and women, too.

I know a combat veteran of the American war in Panama. He served in the Marines during that war, in the waning days of 1989. His unit helicoptered into the theater of operations in the opening hours of Operation Just Cause, assigned to seek out and destroy elements of the Panamanian military.

He told me once what it was like. Crawling silent through the jungle soaked in sweat, toward the enemy soldier up ahead in the darkness. Unsheathing a knife, pulling the man backwards off his feet. Slicing open his throat. All in a day's work. Him or me, my acquaintance said. You do what you have to. He did it a great many times.

Years later I traveled with the man and his wife. We stayed in the same room at a hotel in the desert. In the dead night air he woke up shouting, lunging to his feet in a combat crouch, moving like an animal on the hunt. I never saw him move like that before. Never heard that other voice that came from his throat, as he defended himself against phantoms. He wasn't the same person any more. When his wife moved toward him to wake him from the possession, I wondered what I could possibly do if he tried to hurt her. But it was okay. He returned to his waking self. Putting on the persona. Making it through the ensuing day. His marriage eventually disintegrated. From what I can tell, he doesn't really believe in post-traumatic stress disorder. Not for him.

Last year I sat in a conference room alone with an Iraqi physician, listening to his experiences in Baghdad during the shock and awe of 2003 and the civil war after that. In the days leading up to the U.S. attack, he and his wife stayed in the Iraqi capital even when they knew an American onslaught was coming no matter what.

The physician described what it was like when the bombs began raining from the sky and the booms shook the foundations of the Earth and the sky erupted in gigantic flashes of light. Before the bombing, he and his wife imagined they would just stay inside and ride it out. But it was so loud, he told me later. We never imagined what it would be like. The way everything shook, the way your guts sloshed and heaved with the concussions, the way the explosions made that awful godlike thundering crack, the way it just went on and on and on.

The Iraqi doctor's eyes filled with tears as he told the story. In America you watched it on television, he said, but it was different on the ground, living through it. It was so loud and it wouldn't stop and everybody was so afraid and kept screaming. The whole neighborhood and everyone in the city, millions of people, screaming in unison with every rolling slamming quaking shudder of the explosions from the jets and missiles in the sky.

This Iraqi doctor was and is a supporter of the American military presence in Iraq. But he said of that night when the bombs fell: I never heard anything like it. A whole city screaming. In the telling of it, tears came to his eyes.

You have no idea what violence is like. 

* * * * *

A few days ago, for a little while, I believed that I found myself in the midst of the next media friendly mass killing spree by the latest maniac with a gun. Behind a locked door in a room full of strangers I waited to see what would happen. I called my parents and told them I was safe. Just in case this turned out to be as horrifying as my primal Stone Age brain told me it might.

It wasn't. Not for us, in that office on that day. But for others it was, on that day and all the rest. Millions and millions of people. Some of the violence they live through is financed by my tax dollars, earnestly defended by strangers and friends. Carried out by people like the Marine who fought in Panama, against people like the doctor from Iraq. In Afghanistan and elsewhere. Day after day.

It's all justified by the best intentions and the most sophisticated logic. By the insistence, for example, that in Afghanistan we of the West must finish what we started. There is a moral obligation, it is said, and a vital strategic interest. Afghanistan must not fall to extremists. Its people must not be left at the mercy of savages who will use their country again as a base, committing new atrocities against their community and against imagined enemies far away. Against people in the United States and allied countries, governed by institutions which, despite their sins and failures, try mostly to muddle through on the way to a decent life. For their own citizens and for all nations. To the extent, at least, that human imperfections will allow.

That is how the reigning story tells it. The way I once did to a survivor of atrocities, who woke up every day wondering if she should be in the world at all. Our time together ended and we don't speak any more. Sometimes I hear about what she's up to, and I hope she's okay. Back when I knew her, I sometimes tried to tell her how much it meant to me that she told her story. How much it affected me. Or think it did. Maybe I'm not qualified to judge. Even now, I can only know the aftermath of what was done to her. And remember her story. I can't really know what it was like for her. And is.

I do know that I react differently now to justifications of state-sponsored violence. The intellectual part of me still remembers why the official stories once felt true and right. Why I repeated them and believed them in the days after September 11, 2001. Going on a decade later, I can't do that anymore. When someone writes with great earnestness of the necessary war in Afghanistan, I read the earnest defense of subjecting a child to rape. Not some idealized hypothetical child but a real woman that I woke up next to every morning, once upon a time. I read calibrated pragmatism pointing out, with due sobriety and seriousness, that as a child this woman necessarily had to be held down by force while strangers performed the exact spiritual equivalent of burning her face away with a blow torch. The strangers had no choice but to make her scream. And keep doing it to her because, after all, this had to be done, because in the real world, you see, there really is no choice. That's the official story.

To encounter such reasoning is to be told that its mechanistic atrocities will go on forever. Because they always have. This could well be true. The way of things, chronicled across all history, destined to go on forever. If so, there is nothing to be done. Except try to tell the story differently than the authorities would have it. The way it was once told to me, by a woman I once knew. I didn't understand her at first, but I decided to try. And here I am. I did have a choice after all.

The choice didn't make me a pacifist. I can still imagine necessary wars. Grieve for the warriors, like the man who went to Panama and came back hollow. Understand why he did what he did, to survive and come home. On that day when I waited for Columbine in a locked office, I all but prayed for the S.W.A.T. team to blow the shooter's skull to bits.

We live in the world where such things happen, and sometimes must. But I like to think I'm a little less delusional about what they mean. What violence and war really do, to targets and perpetrators alike.